Regular readers of my blog and followers on Twitter will have spotted that I love quotations – especially romantic ones. I find them inspiring, and they often eloquently voice a sentiment one struggles to put into words.

I was intrigued to see recent reports of a survey commissioned to boost publicity for the DVD release of romantic comedy film Going the Distance. Two thousand adults voted for their favourite romantic line from literature. The top ten results were as follows:

1. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same – Emily Brontë
2. If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you. – AA Milne
3. But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun. – Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
4. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. – WH Auden
5. You know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams. – Dr. Seuss
6. When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
7. Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be. – Robert Browning
8. For you see, each day I love you more. Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow. – Rosemonde Gerard
9. But to see her was to love her, love but her, and love her forever. – Robert Burns
10. I hope before long to press you in my arms and shall shower on you a million burning kisses as under the Equator. – Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1796 dispatch to wife Josephine

Common themes are clear: beauty, dreams coming true, unity, timelessness, the ache of absence, heat, embrace, kiss. But it is the melding of souls, as epitomised in Brontë’s famous line from Wuthering Heights, that is at the very pinnacle of romance. Soulmates. Destined to be together. Two halves of a whole.

The preceding phrase in Wuthering Heights I think, perhaps, is crucial as well: ‘He’s more myself than I.’ Your soulmate makes you the best you can be; is your perfect match; is the best part of you.

How tragic that the most romantic line in literature is a woman speaking of a man with whom she will never be in this world. Still, we hope that they have been reunited in the next world – for theirs is a love that knows no boundaries; what we all aspire to.